Others approached Cursed Child with enthusiasm but found it lacking.
Rowling, ‘Don’t create anymore,’ why would you say that?” I don’t get that at all … To tell somebody like J.K. “What I don’t understand is when people tell J.K.
“I think everybody has the right, obviously, to choose what media they consume,” she says. “When I love a story, I want as much of it as I can.” In fact, she found a new favorite character in Cursed Child: Scorpius Malfoy, who she calls “a beacon of joy.” But Anelli, author of Harry, A History and head of fan conventions like Leak圜on, Geek圜on and Broadwa圜on, does sense a backlash from fans who don’t want Rowling to keep meddling with the canon. “I don’t understand Potter fatigue,” she says.
Professional Potter aficionado Melissa Anelli is mystified by such criticism. Sample headlines: “After 20 years of Harry Potter, the boy who lived needs to die already,” Quartz “Harry Potter and the Curse of Continuation,” The Atlantic. (Indeed, some of these fans didn’t even like the tidy summing-up in the Deathly Hallows epilogue.) They’re happy to re-read the old books again and again.Ĭursed Child seems to have brought that tension to a head.
These fans would rather remember the story as it ended with the seventh book, rather than meddling with the fictional world years later. While some welcomed the chance to get a new story about the Boy Who Lived, others have grown weary of character updates in the form of Rowling’s tweets (Hogwarts tuition is free!) and new digital short stories (All about the American Hogwarts!). As a result, readers accepted the original seven books as “canon.” New pieces of information about the Wizarding World-the revelation, for instance, that Dumbledore was gay-amused some fans but dismayed others. For years, Rowling sent mixed signals about whether more Harry stories could be on the way. This is because the Potter scribe has upended the traditional relationship between author and fictional world.